It's a lot like learning SVN vs Git, SVN requires fewer steps to do a commit so you can be "productive" faster. Once you learn Git though you won't care that it took you a bit longer to learn. Prioritizing being productive immediately and instant gratification isn't always the best in the long term.
That's a pretty bad example. Git is widely considered [1] to be overly complex and difficult to learn compared to something like Mercurial. The advantage Git has is its dominance in terms of adoption/community. Scala does not have juggernaut dominance in programming languahes.
[1] I acknowledge this is debatable, but it's an opinion I agree with.
